At the last CLUG meeting there was some discussion around btrfs (binary tree file system), a copy on write file system that is friendlier towards SSDs and enables some great features like snapshots and raid. I decided to take it for a spin on my old eeePC 4G. It is one of the original eeePC with 512MB RAM and a 4G internal SSD. Linux Mint 13 (Maya) has outgrown the 4G internal SSD, so I used an 8G SDHC card for the OS.
Mint/Ubuntu install lets you select the btrfs file system at install time, or you can convert from ext3/4 afterwards. I chose to install with btrfs and it worked without issues. There is a harmless bug in one of the startup scripts that causes the error message "Sparse file is not allowed" on reboots. It can be easily fixed by commenting out the offending check in the startup script, or installing /boot on an ext3/4 partition. So far everything looked great. Then I ran Mint update to bring the OS up to current software levels. It ran for about 28 hours! I had previously installed Maya on the same system with ext4 and I don't remember how long the update took, but it was no more than 2 or 3 hours at most. It appears as though btrfs needs lots of resources to perform, although it is promoted as higher performance than ext3/4. I haven't used the system much since the install. Even with xfce it is sluggish but usable. Maya is based on the latest Ubuntu long term support 12.04 which has kernel 3.2.0 . btrfs docs recommend the latest kernel possible since btrfs is under heavy development. Both SUSE and Oracle are claiming btrfs is ready for production service. Anyone else have experience with btrfs? How does it perform on more capable hardware? Is there a kernel level below which it should be avoided? _______________________________________________ clug-talk mailing list [email protected] http://clug.ca/mailman/listinfo/clug-talk_clug.ca Mailing List Guidelines (http://clug.ca/ml_guidelines.php) **Please remove these lines when replying
